Stubbing the toe of indifference

I once had a student who asked, “Why the Jews?”

Good question, I thought.  Aside from my Jewish grandmother’s propensity to find fault with the world, blaming it for her OWN woes… would say, especially towards the last year or two of her life, that people treated the Jews more despicably than black Americans, Hispanics, and even Asians.

Moreover, she had a neighbor in Florida who was an attorney for survivors of the Holocaust… helping them to regain their homes, businesses, and valuables taken by the Nazis during the war.  She had a GREAT distain for ANYONE not Jewish.  You see, she was a child survivor of Auschwitz and once showed me the numbers on her arm.  That was a LONG time ago and I was too naive to ask the right questions, so I didn’t ask.  Now, I wish she were alive so that I could interview her and write her story down, if it hasn’t been already.

Needless to say, before anyone gets in a huff over what I’ve written thus far, I understand their perspective.  Just like I understand my Italian grandmother when she used to tell me how poorly they were treated because they were Italian.  And, just like countless of other people (Irish, Eastern Europeans like Romanians, Slavics, etc) who also could lay claim to the fact that their ancestors also were treated like crap. 

Then, I thought…

Hell, EVERYONE has been treated like crap at some point, right?  English indentured servants… African slaves… Ameri-Indians… Chinese people laying railroad track in the West… German-Americans during the World Wars… Japanese-Americans during WW2…Hawaiians in the late 1800s…  Prostitutes… French women with hair armpits and legs… The little Danish kid who stuffed his finger in the dyke to keep it from bursting… gay people… mixed race children in the South… toothless rednecks… and the list goes on and ON.

So, one day I asked how does one describe “discrimination”? I looked into a sea of blank faces.. then gave them a list of words that mean the same thing as discrimination:

• Anti-Semitism
• Bigotry
• Boundary maintenance (to reinforce an ethnic group’s unity and distinctness by emphasizing the traits that set them apart from others)
• Discrimination
• Ethnocide
• Favoritism
• Hatred
• Genocide
• Hypodescent (criterion for assigning specific races based on hereditary relationships; i.e. Nazis using this criterion for labeling people as Jews whose only connection with Judaism was a grandparent; also used in N. America to label people as African American even if they were mostly European in biological ancestry; also the “drop of blood criterion”)
• Inequity
• Injustice
• Intolerance
• Partiality
• Prejudice
• Racism
• Sexism
• Unfairness

So, why the Jews?  There are a lot of arguments… they are God’s chosen people… wrong place/wrong time… because of usury laws in Medieval Europe (Christians not allowed to loan money with interest, but Jews could)… their religion… the fact that they won’t convert to Christianity and abandon their faith… or that the Old Testament discusses their rights as the People of God. 

Hitler hated them… Mussolini despised them only because Hitler did… Stalin persecuted and killed millions of them… people throughout Europe and the United States have called them names, spray-painted their synogogues, kicked over their tombstones, created hate groups to persecute them.

I can’t take sides… because its hard.  There have been so many groups that have suffered.. most specifically the native tribes of the Americas… that went from about ten-to-fifteen million down to barely a smattering because of slavery, disease, and guns.

Hmm… which to pick, who to choose…
African slaves who, by no fault of their own, were captured, sold, and transported to the Americas by the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Spanish to replace the natives as slaves, to work on sugarcane, tobacco, rice, or cotton plantations for the rest of their lives, losing their culture, religion… in order to be Americanized… or like the white Anglo-Saxon WASPs that permeated North America.

Oh wait………… let’s back up a little.  When the Anglos and Saxons were amongst a variety of nomadic tribes that not only tried to (and sometimes successfully) invade ROME… they were treated (at times) with savagery… by the Roman military, who at one time NEEDED them to fill the ranks of their military… and eventually were replaced by these groups that had enveloped Europe… the Gauls in Spain, the Franks in France, the Picts/Scots of Scotland… the Celts, Britons of England… the Anglos, Saxons and Goths that settled throughout Germany, Poland, Austria, and parts of eastern Europe.

Anglos… and Saxons… once tribes despised by Romans… one day became the model of what was an appropriate “white person” in the Americas NEEDED to be… and everyone WANTED to be them… and not Romans/Italians, Hispanics, Amerindians, Poles, Black or Purple with little orange polka dots…. wow… love it when a revelation happens mid-writing.

I guess this probably doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you understand the origins and migratory prowess of early civilizations… but its interesting, to say the least.

And, to think it all began in the Middle East… in the Fertile Crescent… where Iraq and Iran currently exist.  Hmm… the circle of discrimination just spins, sometimes uncontrollably, until the little red arrow picks who will be next on the hot seat.

…let that swirl around in your mind for a few, then get back to me with your thoughts.